The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

ReadWriteWeb writes "Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) Charles S. Knight has compiled a list of the top 100 alternative search engines. The list includes Artificial Intelligence systems, Clustering engines, Recommendation Search engines, Metasearch, and many more hidden gems of search. People use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But Knight has discovered, via his work as an SEO, that in the other .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines around."

Intranet Vs Internet

As with most lists, I've got some nitpicking to do.

All the large companies I've worked for don't care about world wide web search engines. Those engines used by the populace with the revenue coming from ads or 'paid search' or some indirect service business model. Now, a lot of companies are interested in Enterprise Search Engines and would pay a lot of money directly to a search engine company to come in and set up the technology to do intranet searches.

The engine we currently use at my fortune 500 company sucks. I mean it is the worst. I would rather have a blindfold on with stumps for hands trying to type in an estimation of the internal IP address than use our search engine. That said, I have been told that we investigated using "Google Technology" although my superiors soon found that it wasn't at all better than what we already had. And so I've heard of a few others that have doubted Google's ability to dominate in a closed domain. They are clearly the winners in an open domain internet search but I haven't seen anyone take advantage of it as well internally ... yet.

So while the external market may be broken down 99.99 to 0.01, the internal enterprise search side isn't that lopsided.

Two engines that I've used and found to be novel ideas are BrightPlanet's Deep Query Manager [brightplanet.com] and Collexis [collexis.us] (NIH demo [collexis.net]). DQM is able to extract data from databases that are available through search on the local page but are not indexed by Google. DQM has you create jobs since they take so long to run. Collexis can process raw text and fingerprint it, then compare that fingerprint to documents that have been fingerprinted quickly. Two ideas that Google, MSN & Yahoo! don't really cover. I find it odd that a site like Yoople (what appears to be a slow German Google) made it on this list but not DQM.

Re:Intranet Vs Internet

Could it be that your internal search sucks because your internal data is poorly organized, poorly written, and poorly tagged? Google isn't very good at finding stuff without the necessary clues. Search is only as good as the data stream. That's why SEOs always have lots of work - so many bad websites, so little time. If you know what you want, Google is great. If you don't know what you want (don't know the keywords), read Wikipedia to learn what to ask for.

Closed domains & this thing called "Access Rig

The engine we currently use at my fortune 500 company sucks. I mean it is the worst. I would rather have a blindfold on with stumps for hands trying to type in an estimation of the internal IP address than use our search engine. That said, I have been told that we investigated using "Google Technology" although my superiors soon found that it wasn't at all better than what we already had. And so I've heard of a few others that have doubted Google's ability to dominate in a closed domain. They are clearly the winners in an open domain internet search but I haven't seen anyone take advantage of it as well internally ... yet.

Closed domains have this thing called "Access Rights" - typically governed by either Novell Directory Services, or Microsoft Active Directory.

By and large, most enterprises don't want the janitor to be able to get on a kiosk terminal and surf the local search engine until he arrives at the document entitled FISCAL_YEAR_BRIBES_PAID_TO_MEMBERS_OF_THE_LOCAL_ZO NING_BOARD.DOC - that's the kind of thing that only the most elite of the grand poo-bahs are allowed to access.

So a "closed domain" document spider is gonna have to be granted Administrator/Supervisory rights to the authentication infrastructure [which is a HUGE security risk in and of itself], and then it's gonna have to keep track of the pertinent access control lists before deciding whether or not individual users have the right to view search results.

And if, as is typical, you've got four or five different authentication infrastructures in an enterprise [Novell Directory Services, Microsoft Active Directory, Sun iPlanet Directory Services, Oracle Internet Directory Services, etc etc etc], and if they aren't all tied together in some kinduva coherent LDAP framework, then that's just a massively complex project to even think about attempting to undertake.

Unusual definition of "alternative"

I was expecting to see specialized search engines, rather than generalized ones that happen to use unusual algorithms. Things like Baidu Mp3 search or Astalavista; the ones that allow special-purpose searches that feeding them into google would just produce crap.

Re:Unusual definition of "alternative"

I agree, I was expecting better - in my opinion there are a host of features that people have been talking about for years that haven't appeared in any search engine I've used.

Things like:

* searching by md5 hash to find where a random file on your hard drive came from

* allowing the specifying of precise image size or dimensions to find a specific image - e.g., google indexes an image, you see the thumbnail, want to find it, but the original site is down - why can't google show me other images that match the original size and dimensions of that cached image, to help me find a mirror?

* A search engine that rec0gn!s3s 4|_|_ 5p3c!4L cH4rAters

* filtering search results by IP range

* incorporating WHOIS details in search results (e.g foo +bar -foobar inurl:baz author:"J. Random Hacker")

and so on, ideas that I hear mentioned occasionally but that never seem to go anywhere. Most of them would be fairly trivial to implement - perhaps file hashing would be too CPU intensive, but it could be limited to smaller files, or less acpu intensive algorithm could be used.

Anyways, most of these I'd only use if they were added to Google - when it comes right down to it, database size is king with search engines - I'm happy to leave the meta/interactive/social/tagging side of things to the social bookmarking sites.

Don't want "Alternative and Creative"

.. I want "accurate"

my favorite alternative search engine:

zombo.com [zombo.com]

when i go there, i simply forget what i was looking for. problem solved. because you can do anything at zombo.com

Since when is a "driven social content website"...

a search engine?

http://www.digg.com/about [digg.com]

Source code search engine?

Does slashdot or Sourceforge have a decent search engine to look for source code, sample code for particular APIs ?

Do the wiki tiki.

Ha, that's OK. I just use Google to find pages on Wikipedia. It's got all the information I'LL ever need from the internet.

In all seriousness. There must be a reason why Google's floated to the top of the search engine love list, and I highly doubt it can be their (nonexistant) effective advertising campaign or their (also nonexistant) entertaining flashed-based website, because we all know people love those. No, I have to say that Google's got to have come up on top because they've been giving fairly accurate results. I know that if my search results were completely off, there would be almost nothing keeping me from switching to a new search; and, ironically, a search on Google for search engine brings up quite a few possibilities.

I see no problem here... I'll just move right along.

Re:Do the wiki tiki.

No, I have to say that Google's got to have come up on top because they've been giving fairly accurate results.

"Accurate" had nothing to do with it. In a time when having keywords was the way to get to the top of the popular search engines, Google implemented a social ranking system; it really wasn't about being accurate so much as it was about "if everyone thinks you're link worthy, then you're probably an authority on some subject."

There's plenty of talk about community-supported information and social networks, but Google was the first serious attempt at utilizing that information way before such discussions were popular.

Excite? Altavista?

Just gotta ask: what happened to Excite and Altavista? Both of these guys still look up...

music map

Music map is interesting, but I needed to enable scripts in FireFox, I don't see reason why it uses scripts and all this animation instead simple results list.
http://www.music-map.com/ [music-map.com]

Wanted: Old school search engine

I want a search engine like Google was before they bought into blogging and brought that bias into their search results. Search engines that bias results in favor of pages that are heavily linked to end up supporting the status quo over newer-but-better ideas/products/pages, the corporate bullies vs Hertz. This could be a great small business incubator. Does such an engine exist today?

How many of them...

are typosquatters?

Find everything there is to know about "salshdot!"

Vast multitude....

They are entirely right, many of the most revolutionary search engines out there are not mainstream. Did you know that the big four comprise less than half of the top 10 most innovative search engines?

Call him by his proper title.

"Search engine Spammer". There's no such thing as SEO.

Alternative Search Biz Plan

"in the other .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines around" -- all looking to get bought by one of the top four.

Suspect source

The article was written by an SEO. Who says he doesn't rank them by how easy they are for him to manipulate?

Creative and Innovative?

"But Knight has discovered, via his work as an SEO, that in the other .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines around." I guess the problem I have with this statement is just how exactly 'innovative' and 'creative' are quantified? Specifics from the article: KartOO and Quintura are listed as being particularly innovative and creative. How so? Graphically, maybe, but the 'maps' that these search engines provide seem like a graphical gimmick at best, and downright annoying at worst. Metasearch engines, while useful, don't strike me as being either particularly innovative or creative; they work well when searching for something particularly obscure, but for a 'day to day' type search, I've often found that even with very specific search criteria I often have to sort through a bunch of useless search results before finding something useful; using a metasearch engine gives me a longer list of worthless resources before finding what I need. While there is something to be said for creativity and innovation, I've found that for my purposes, a simple interface like google works the best. I'll concede that I may be a fanboy without realizing it, however.

"The web is 3D..."

Yikes. If you have a graph with N nodes, it's N-dimensional. There are more than three websites. The difficulty is embedding the graph in two or three dimensional space. There are lots of algorithms for doing this, choosing the distance between nodes, and so on. Each necessarily discards some information, but choosing the right one could help. And maybe such a look at the web would be interesting, but it doesn't seem like it's always the most useful. You're probably interested in the big clusters, the centers of which are found by Google's PageRank and displayed in order. Google can hide the leaves of each cluster, true, but they may be (a) less important or (b) easy to get to from the center.

Why at least one of those sucks...

Liveplasma links Transsiberian Orchestra with Iron Maiden. Yeah, I see so much in common there.

innovative, but...

"...lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines..."
They're innovative and creative, but nearly useless as well.

Did somebody just do a google search

On the term "alternative search engine" and post the first 100 results as an article?

same old same old

Not so long ago, you'd see such a list as everyone using Yahoo!, Altavista, Hotbot and Google was mentionned with the 1% also-rans.

Time changes things, but not all that much. Some go up, some go down. I'd be willing to place a bet that some of their top-4 will dissappear in the next ten to twenty years while one of the also-rans will become a household name. *shrug*

The list is bad

Vivisimo not among the top 100? This is silly. Vivisimo is the first I turn to when Google fails to deliver. And they cover Googles shortcomings very well.
In my book (and that of many others) Vivisimo is SE #2. And for good reasons too.

www.vivisimo.com

Re:The list is bad

http://www.vivisimo.com/ [vivisimo.com] is the company.

however, their search engine can be found here: http://clusty.com/ [clusty.com] , which also appears to be in the list.
maybe you also want to re-bookmark it, as the page is much nicer :)

Many of these use a top-4 backend

This list is junk.

A9 uses MSN or Google, SimplyGoogle uses Google, Soople uses Google, etc, etc, etc. They just provide a new or innovate method of presenting the results, the result order is still the same.

Also, Digg is listed? Del.icio.us? AOL???

I'd rather have a top-10 list of REAL alternative search engines, not "portals" and such written by a SEO of a search engine optimization company.

so far... not so good

I decided to try searching for myself in some of these search engines, and though i might show up eventually on the page, I don't see them as being more accurate than Google... I mean, what about Ninja.com... that actually did turn out to be more accurate than Google... but some of these are linking me to the French musician by a similar name......

Not on the list: Scirus

I don't see http://scirus.com/ [scirus.com] - scientific information search engine.

Twenty bucks says

Part of this guy's research involved Googling "alternative search engines."

Blinkx

Don't trust the makers of blinkx [google.co.uk]

Source of marketing data?

Does anyone know whether that "99.99%" figure is accurate, or was it pulled out of the author's nether regions? Because it sure doesn't smell right.

Flawed search engines

I typed Dreadful Snakes into the music search engine No results, Funny I have 2 of their Bluegrass albums

more like top 100 random sites

Many of those are NOT search engines at all (at most sites with a search feature) and many fairly well known, useful and actual search engines are ignored - where is technorati [technorati.com]? where is boardtracker [boardtracker.com]? blogpulse [blogpulse.com]? sphere [sphere.com]?

At least the 'author' could have done 5 mins research to find something actually relating to the title..

Lack of worldwide view.

People use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order).

Here China has over 130 million Internet users, and Baidu shares over half of the web search market. But the article claims the four big shares 99.99%, so we are not count as "people" according to it!?

Yoople! for collaborative search

Ehy Yoople! is in the list! Great news...unfortunately it's linked to a wrong address...and that's not great!eheheh Yoople! is http://www.yoople.net/ [yoople.net]

Anyone else find that depressing?

Usage stats for some of those can't be too good.

Or maybe I'm wrong. But it seems like the big 2 or 3 would command 99.99% of all search traffic,
leaving very little for these guys.

Wayback Search

I don't see that any of these "alternative" search engines offer fixes to Google's current shortcomings (or at least the ones I run into). Personally, I can't wait til there's the Wayback Machine's [archive.org] archives are searchable by text rather than just domain. Hell, I'd even be appreciative if you could search for parts of domains. I can't overstate how often I'm driven crazy by remembering something from a site I saw long ago and not being able to refresh my memory because the site either went down or fell out of Google's listings.

One more: Bessed

Our site Bessed [bessed.com] is a human-powered engine built on WordPress to allow for commenting on search results & adding new sites. Just launched in October so nowhere near comprehensive, but I think we pass the innovative test.

Metacrawler

Metacrawler.com [metacrawler.com] was the original metasearch, and it's still my number one choice. I can't believe it didn't make the list. You can even (through a configurable cookie) choose which search engines you do and do not want to use, so if you dislike Google, for example, you don't have to use it.

The Final Answer: The Top 100 Search Engines List

Hi - I am Charles Knight, the creator and keeper of this list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. I have *already* updated the list based up good feedback, which I shall continue to do all year long. If you would like a copy of the very latest version, just send me an email at: [e-mail]. The list you receive will have the revised Top 100, Search Engines not yet reviewed, Search Engines not yet released in Stealth Mode, Mobile Search Engines and the list of Search Engines that did not make the Top 100 list. Thank you for all of your helpful suggestions!

del.icio.us *IS* a search engine.

It searches a catalog of links. What more do you want? When google fails me, del.icio.us is the 2nd place I try. I think of a tag, and look at the most popular links of the tag. This actually sometimes gives me better results than a google search. If I am seraching via delicious, I'm not the only one.